del seoul

When I think of tacos, like truly authentic, mind blowing tacos, there’s one country that stands out as the quintessential taco authority. That’s right, I’m talking about South Korea. I’ll have to do some fact checking, but I believe Kim Jong-Il invented tacos as a young man before sharing the recipe with his southern counterpart. And, boy, am I glad he did!

Del Seoul routinely comes up when searching for the best tacos in Chicago. So, I headed to yuppyville with my lady friend for the first stop on the Taco Tour not inspired by a Spanish-speaking country. So, how are Korean tacos?

While there are a few things I’d change about the tacos, overall, they are very good. Even if they don’t resemble the tacos we have all grown to know and love, they are just as tasty in their own right.

I tried three tacos, the shrimp, beef short ribs and the bbq pork. They are all topped with toasted sesame seeds and a secret slaw, (I’m pretty sure it’s just lettuce, cilantro and some type of chile aioli). All three are excellent, but the beef short ribs taco stands out as my favorite. Short rib meat is a little more tender than the spare ribs we’re used to in the good ol’ U.S. of A., and these are very tender.

All of the tacos are pretty sweet and need some Sriracha to spice them up. The shrimp tacos are also very good, but they use a breaded, deep fried shrimp, and I prefer grilled shrimp. I enjoyed the bbq pork, but they are advertised as spicy, and aren’t. A couple nit-picky things, but that’s what you get when you’re dealing with a taco diva…

Maybe a lil’ too much secret slaw.

There are a lot of other tasty things on the menu, including the kimchi fries, but I’ll leave those up to another idiot blogger loser.